


Valley Time

by hellkitty



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, First Kiss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-09-22 06:42:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9589265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: OMG I am so rusty with this fandom and pairing which is one of my all time favorite OTPs,  but I couldn't resist the lure to at least give it a shot.  Hope you like it!





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [redcandle17](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redcandle17/gifts).



Ace could read Furiosa’s mood even from here--fifteen feet behind her. It was something about the hunch of her shoulders, the set of her jaw, the way her heels hit the stone floor just so--just a little bit hard, but not quite a stomp.  

“I don’t like it either, boss,” he said, just loud enough for her to hear. He hadn’t survived as long as he had in Immortan Joe’s Citadel by letting his opinions reach too big a circuit.  

Furiosa slowed her stride, just a bit, enough for him to catch up.  “We know how it’s going to end.”  

“Yeah.” He gave a long, thoughtful inhale, like a sigh.  “Could refuse it. Set it on one of the other Imperators.”  

“Wouldn’t change anything in the end. Someone would go, and come back, and then….” Her one fist clenched as the sentence broke down. She didn’t need to finish it: he knew the way it ended--the way almost all of Immortan Joe’s expeditions ended. A raid, killing the men, taking the women, packaging up anything Joe thought they could use, and burning anything they couldn’t take with them.  

They rounded a corner, to one of the openings in the ancient stone and the Citadel itself seemed to spill open in front of them--the greens of Joe’s orchards bright against the eroded sky, the rusty stone a long tangle of shadows, and beyond that, the paler shades stretching toward a flat, sand-colored horizon.  

“Could say there’s nothin’ there.” He knew as soon as he said it that it wouldn’t work. Just wishful thinking, something he thought he’d gotten over by now. And honestly, he didn’t really care. Wasn’t like he’d never been on a raid before. Wasn’t like he’d never been on a recon run before. So why did he care now, fumbling over his words like this?  

Furiosa didn’t seem to notice. “I’d thought about a breakdown on the way, but that would only delay. What’s a few more days?” She rested her hands, flesh and metal, on the lip of the stone.

He wasn’t sure if that was one of those rhetorical questions or not.  “Few days only makes a difference if they got warning somethin’s comin’.”  If not, well, one day was as good as another to die surprised, he figured.

“Point.”  Furiosa squinted into the daylight, almost as if she could see this Bartertown place from here. Ace just kept his eyes on her, studying the lines of her face, the contrast of the softness of her mouth and the hardness around her eyes.  He wanted to touch her--even had to stop his hand from moving forward to do it.  

“Fact is,” Ace said, trying to pull himself back to himself, somehow. Maybe he was getting sick--well, sicker.  It shouldn’t surprise him, really.  He’d outlived too many far younger men--some of them still boys.  Maybe these strange thoughts were some kind of fever, the sickness in him finally getting into his brain.  “Fact is, just ain’t enough to go around for everyone out there. We give ‘em a chance to survive.”

“Some of them,” Furiosa said. “Some of them.” Women, of the right age, men, if the Mechanic needed fresh blood.  Most outside men weren’t good for much beyond that--too hard headed to change, to accept the V8.  

“Still better’n none of them,” Ace countered, but his heart wasn’t in it, not like it should be. Still, he hoped there was enough of a hint in his voice--she was edging toward treason. Blasphemy. He should report her.

He knew he wouldn’t.  

She stared at the horizon, searching for something like an answer, he supposed, and then she sighed, shoulders sliding down. “Some is better than none,” she said, finally, her eyes catching the blue of the sky in them as she turned to him.  “Planning?”

Ace felt his own shoulders release, like the world was returning to something he knew, or that weird fever that was disrupting his thoughts was passing.  “Figured a three-day out. Take it slow till the last day. Maybe grab us an outlier, see if we can find out what their defenses are.”

“Could go in slow,” Furiosa said. “Place is called ‘Bartertown’.  Maybe we could go in and, I don’t know...barter.”  A flicker of a smile.

Ace frowned. It’d be exposing his men--her men--without much backup. And if this place did barter, that did cause its own kind of problem. Especially if there were women there.  “Small team.” Trusted team.  Not that he didn’t trust his War Boys with his life. But there were plenty of other things he didn’t trust them with.

“You and me,” Furiosa nodded.  

He couldn’t begin to say why that made his heart seem to rise in his chest.

OoOoOoOoOoO

“See?” Furiosa said.  They’d come through the gates at dawn, when they’d opened, with a throng of other people.  He could pick out, barely, on a banner of sun-faded fabric, ‘Valley Time Day’. Thee sides of the banner tinkled and glinted in the dusty daylight with bits of metal and glass.  “Barter.”  

Ace grunted acknowledgement.  She was doing a better job taking it all in, but then again, she wasn’t the one pulling all the security around here. And here, this bustling outdoor market? Everything looked like a threat.  Those awning poles, stretching patched fabric over crowded booths? Could be (should be, to his mind) lances.  That brazier, where someone was roasting ground lizards on thin skewers?  Fire was a damn good weapon. That brazier was heavy enough to do plenty of damage, even if it were midnight cold.  And the people!  So many of them, bumping and jostling against each other, wearing these clothes that could be hiding, well, just about anything.  

“Weird way to run things,” Ace muttered.

She shot him a look that might have been sympathetic. Or pained. He couldn’t tell.  “It’s fun, actually. Or it used to be.”  Her eyes got that distant cast again, and he remembered her as a little thing. She’d been taken on a raid, too.  After a recon, probably like this one. 

He gave a noncommittal shrug, but followed her, hand on a knife hilt, as she started cutting through the crowd. This wasn’t her usual stride, going places with a purpose, but ambling, checking the wares in each stall: thick pottery, hubcaps hammered into bowls and cups, dried wrinkly things that were supposed to be some kind of vegetable, old tools: more things than Ace could name and some of them definitely not essential for life. Seemed wasteful, if you asked him.

No one asked him, not even himself. Instead, he caught himself looking at a piece of some kind of stone, polished and wrapped in wire, and wondering how that color, the same color as a blush, or that very earliest light of dawn on a cool day, would look against her tawny skin.  

If this place was getting into his head this bad, who could guess what’d do to the other War Boys?  Good thing he’d come, he told himself. He could handle himself. He could pull himself back on track.  And if he was getting sick, he could keep it together till they were back at the War Rig.  

Furiosa had gone ahead of him, while he was daydreaming about pink stones and that smooth stretch of skin over her chest, hard muscle just above the softer curves of her breasts. When he caught up with her, she’d stepped back, and someone was leaning in front of her, taking one of the chains off her rank belt, before handing her a skewer of meat.

“Fitting in,” she said to him in explanation, before tearing a bite of meat off with her teeth.  “Want some? It’s good.”

He probably shouldn’t, in case it was poisoned, but, well, he couldn’t even make a sensible end to that. She was offering, and he was accepting. It was right in a way that didn't need your brain to figure out.

And it was good--some kind of something on the meat, like spices that tickled the farthest edges of his memory. It was chewy and rich, like eating the sun.  And he didn’t have to talk while he was eating it--could just watch her chew, watch her eyes scan the crowd.

He’d thought they’d draw attention, the way War Boys did in the Bullet Farm or Gas Town, but everyone here was a mishmosh--no two people wore the same kind of clothes, or anything.  It was like there was no order here at all, no rank, no, well, no system.

It was weird.  You needed a system, you needed discipline, to rebuild the world. That’s what Immortan Joe had said, and been proving true for longer than Ace could remember.

He tailed after Furiosa, finding a kind of familiar comfort in the brand on her neck. Look at him, an old man, and homesick!

...maybe protective, too, but that was an insult to Furiosa. The Imperator could take care of herself just fine. Didn’t need him motherhenning around her.  

The market wound around a slow turn, toward a central building, rising up like a miniature Citadel, a level or two above the rest of the buildings huddling inside the boundary walls.  Ace tilted his head up, examining it for weapons, or turrets, or anything, really, when he heard his name.  From Furiosa.  

He cut toward her, slicing through the crowd like a bike on clean redball road. “Boss!”

She was standing in front what looked like a mass of fabric, at first. It took too many seconds for him to spot the person in the colorful swirls of cloth--a face the color of an applewood trunk, eyes milky and wet-looking.  

“Let me see your hand,” the fabric pile croaked, and a pair of spindly, sun-brown hands reached out, taking Furiosa’s hand like bird claws.  

Furiosa beckoned him closer with her other hand, a smile playing with edges of her mouth.  “Let her see yours, too.”  

He shot her a look, but put his hand out, reluctantly, still feeling his heart thumping in his chest, adrenaline from a moment ago simmering in his veins. “What’s this, then?”  

“She’ll tell us.” That farseeing look came over her face again, a homesickness older and worse than his.

“You dream of green,” the woman said, peering up at them with eyes Ace was pretty sure couldn’t see anything. But somehow, the effect was piercing, like she was seeing something else, more than he could.  “A future from the past.”  

“Will I get there?” Furiosa’s voice was soft, but urgent, a kind of voice that sent thrills through the blood. His blood, at any rate. 

The wizened face crinkled into a smile. “Your will takes you many places.”

Furiosa huffed, dissatisfied, but the woman had already turned to Ace. He could feel her thin fingers on the hard callouses of his hand, turning it over, as though it was one of those texts a wordburger could read.  “Strong heart,” she said, finally, tapping in the palm of his hand.  “Why it’s so hard for you to want something.”  Her mouth split into a grin around yellowed teeth. It struck him suddenly, that once, she had been a beautiful woman, the kind that could fill a room, the way Immortan Joe could, without saying a word.

“Don’t want anything,” he scoffed, but the words felt wrong right now. He just couldn’t find words that were right.  

She laughed, squeezing his hand with a strength that surprised him. “Lie to yourself all you want. Lie to me? No.”  She sat back, the fabric--a kind of robe, he could see now, with bright panels and beads--rustling around her. “Since you lie, you are the one to pay me.”

“Pay.”  He shot a glance at Furiosa. He had nothing to ‘pay’ with.  

“No money? Nothing to trade?” The old woman clucked, raising her voice. Others around them stopped bustling in the stalls.  “Guess you’ll have to entertain me, instead.”  

“Make him do a trick!” someone from the audience shouted.

“Dance, Aunty! Make him dance!" called out another.  

“Better!” the old woman said. “A dare!” She seemed to rise up, the sleeves of the robe spreading like wings, his hand still captured in hers.  “Unless he’s afraid!”  She held his hand up to the crowd, which started frothing with noise.  

He met her gaze, level.  Even sightless, she held the same kind of power in her gaze that Immortan Joe had. “Ain’t afraid.”  Unless she asked him to dance.  That...he couldn’t do.  

“It is,” she said, “Valley Time Day, so for your dare, you must kiss a woman!”  The crowd around him roared, applauding.

“Boss,” he said, desperately. He felt every eye in the place on him, like a gasoline spill on his skin, tingling and warm and dangerous.

That smile was tugging the edges of her mouth, and some of the hardness had left her eyes, which now looked less like the hard sky and more like the blue of the water reservoirs.  “I am, technically, a woman.”

“Yeah,” he said--or tried too--words getting stuck in his throat like they’d been rolled over a few miles of dusty road.  

“Am I going to have to make it an order?” She planted her hands on her hips, which just drew his eyes down to them, the enticing, unfamiliar/familiar way her flanks curved out from her waist.  He shook his head, closing the distance between them. His mouth met hers as his hands slid around the curve of her waist, the sweat-damp fabric catching the scent of her, musky and enticing, and as he drew her closer, he felt the flat muscles of his own body meet the softer curves of hers, her breasts pressing against the bare skin of his chest under a fabric layer that felt both too thick and too thin for his liking.

Her mouth opened against his, and he felt her hands on his arms, her flesh-and-blood hand tracing the surface of his bare skin, drawing the skin up like a cool breeze.  Her mouth was warm, though, and tasted like a mysterious sweetness, dark and rich like good earth. His whole body tensed, throbbing with a need so intense it bordered on pain.  He couldn’t tell if the crowd was cheering, or if it was his own blood roaring through his ears.

All he knew for sure was that letting go of her was the hardest thing he’d ever have to do.


End file.
